Day: May 13, 2018

Tom Usher, reporting for Vice: I arrived at the venue — a Jurys Inn hotel — on a wet Saturday morning, to discover that the event was essentially a small carpeted convention room boasting a few cameras, some stalls selling merchandise, and 70 or so attendees watching PowerPoint presentations beamed onto a wall. As I entered, I was offered a gift of “fluoride-free” toothpaste. This made perfect sense, given the…

President Trump said Sunday that he and Chinese President Xi Jinping are working to put the troubled Chinese telecom manufacturer ZTE back in business. From a report: “President Xi of China, and I, are working together to give massive Chinese phone company, ZTE, a way to get back into business, fast,” Trump said in a message on Twitter. “Too many jobs in China lost. Commerce Department has been instructed to…

An anonymous reader shares a report: New England’s groundfish season is in full swing, as hundreds of dayboat fishermen from Rhode Island to Maine take to the water in search of the region’s iconic cod and haddock. But this year, several dozen of them are hauling in their catch under the watchful eye of video cameras as part of a new effort to use technology to better sustain the area’s…

An anonymous reader writes: Should the Linux operating system be called “Linux” or “GNU/Linux”? These days, asking that question might get as many blank stares returned as asking, “Is it live or is it Memorex?” Some may remember that the Linux naming convention was a controversy that raged from the late 1990s until about the end of the first decade of the 21st century. Back then, if you called it…

Roger Cheng / CNET: Trump tweets that Commerce Department has been instructed to help China’s ZTE, which had to stop operations after US companies were banned from selling to it — In a tweet, Trump urges the Commerce Department to give ZTE “a way to get back into business, fast.” Source: http://www.techmeme.com

Wikipedia has its own internal “Supreme Court,” which adjudicates disputes, takes appeals, and even issues injunctions [Editor’s note: the link may be paywalled]. The cases it hears are as petty as you’d expect. Fascinating story by WSJ: Wikipedia, the vast online crowdsourced encyclopedia, has a high court. It is a panel called the Arbitration Committee, largely unknown to anyone other than Wiki aficionados, which hears disputes that arise after all…

Cory Nealon / Buffalo: Study: less than 10% of users who retweeted false info during disasters removed their RT later, less than 20% of them clarified false RT with a new tweet — Study examines Boston Marathon bombing, Hurricane Sandy; also finds most users fail to correct misinformation Source: http://www.techmeme.com

So many Washingtonians are gliding the final few blocks of their commutes on motorized scooters that a new sharing program cannot keep up with rush-hour demand. Authorities in other big U.S. cities that pioneered the concept are less than thrilled. From a report: […] The pilot program in Washington, which runs until August, is capped at 400 scooter permits. It has been so popular that there are often no vehicles…

Smaller businesses often don’t have as much power to negotiate with cloud vendors, said Allianz’s Jenny Soubra. This makes it even more important for SMBs to carefully consider vendor relationships. Source: http://www.techrepublic.com